There is just emerging and credible evidence that Hurricane #IRMA
will make landfall just some miles to the west of downtown Miami.

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has the best
forecast model in the world based upon skill scores. During Hurricane
Harvey, it beat the human forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

This forecast system has superior hardware to run its calculations and it
better assimilates real-time data—observations from weather networks
around the world, atmospheric soundings, reconnaissance aircraft, and
much more—into its calculations.

So if the Hurricane does not track upstate off the east coast and
instead comes ashore over Miami then that's BIG trouble.

Emmy Award Winning Storm Chaser of over 35 years, Jeff Piotrowski
is down in Miami and today Thursday he just warned that if #IRMA
does come ashore to the west of Miami or over Downtown, then we
will witness the greatest natural disaster in US history.

He warned people to get out of hi-rise buildings in Miami and to also
get out of the area from the Keys all the way to West Palm Beach.

Our assessment is that there is now an unacceptable risk in remaining
in south Florida and we advise immediate evacuation or a move to a
secure location with food and independent long duration power supply.

6PM EST THURSDAY UPDATE - Fox News weather has just discussed the
European model landfall West of Miami, says still unknown until Saturday._________________Minds are like parachutes.
They only function when open.

Last edited by Fintan on Mon Sep 18, 2017 7:15 pm; edited 5 times in total

Peter
This will also extend up to Tampa-St-Pete and perhaps even as far north as the panhandle.
Irma will leave a lasting impression on Florida. It is gonna hurt!

Gonna be some weekend alright. Epecially Tampa.....

WRITTEN BACK IN JULY, 2017 THIS ARTICLE
LAYS OUT HUGE RISKS NOW FACING TAMPA

Quote:

RED AREA SHOWS EXTENT OF 20 FEET STORM SURGE

RED AREA SHOWS EXTENT OF 20 FEET STORM SURGE

Tampa Bay’s coming stormThe area is due for a major hurricane, and it is not prepared.
If a big one scores a direct hit, the damage would likely surpass Katrina.

Story by Darryl Fears, July 28, 2017

Tampa Bay is mesmerizing, with 700 miles of shoreline and some of the finest white sand beaches in the nation. But analysts say the metropolitan area is the most vulnerable in the United States to flooding and damage if a major hurricane ever scores a direct hit.

A Boston firm that analyzes potential catastrophic damage reported that the region would lose $175 billion in a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. A World Bank study called Tampa Bay one of the 10 most at-risk areas on the globe.

Yet the bay area — greater Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater — has barely begun to assess the rate of sea-level rise and address its effects.

The sea in Tampa Bay has risen naturally throughout time, about an inch per decade. But in the early 1990s, scientists say, it accelerated to several inches above normal, so much that recent projections have the bay rising between six inches and more than two feet by the middle of the century and up to nearly seven feet when it ends. On top of that, natural settling is causing land to slowly sink.

By a stroke of gambler’s luck, Tampa Bay hasn’t suffered a direct hit from a hurricane as powerful as a category 3 or higher in nearly a century. Tampa has doubled down on a bet that another won’t strike anytime soon, investing billions of dollars in high-rise condominiums along the waterfront and shipping port upgrades and expanding a hospital on an island in the middle of the bay to make it one of the largest in the state.

Once-sleepy St. Petersburg has gradually followed suit, adorning its downtown coast with high-rise condominiums, new shops and hotels. The city is in the final stages of a plan to build a $45 million pier as a major attraction that would extend out into the bay.

Worried that area leaders weren’t adequately focused on the downside of living in a tropic, the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council reminded them of the risks by simulating a worst-case scenario hurricane, a category 5 with winds exceeding 156 mph, to demonstrate what would happen if it entered the Gulf of Mexico and turned their way.

The fictitious Phoenix hurricane scenario projects that wind damage would destroy nearly half a million homes and businesses. About 2 million residents would require medical treatment, and the estimated death toll, more than 2,000, would top the number of people who perished from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Florida’s most densely populated county, Pinellas, could be sliced in half by a wave of water. The low-lying county of about a million is growing so fast that there’s no land left to develop, and main roads and an interstate connecting it to Tampa get clogged with traffic even on a clear day.

“If a hurricane 4 or 5 hit us,” St. Petersburg City Council Chairman Darden Rice said, referring to the two highest category storms, “there’s no doubt about it. The plan is you’d better get out of Dodge.”

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn’s warning was even starker. Standing outside City Hall last year, he described what would happen if a hurricane as small as a category 3 with 110 mph to 130 mph winds hit downtown.

“Where you’re standing now would be 15 feet under water,” he said.

Video simulations of hurricanes that strafed Florida but missed Tampa Bay look like an epic game of dodgeball.

“It’s like we’re in this sweet spot. It’s like we’re blessed somehow, protected,” said Allison Yeh, a planner for Hillsborough County in Tampa.

The last direct hit from a category 3 in 1921 left the area in ruins, but few people lived there then. A single death was recorded.

Now, with 4 million residents and gleaming new infrastructure, the stakes are higher, and Yeh and her fellow planners are wary. They know a major hurricane like one of several that barely missed the bay in recent years would have a devastating effect.

There are few hurricane-proof buildings in the bay area. One is a gallery, the Salvador Dali Museum in downtown St. Petersburg with 18-inch-thick concrete walls and pressured glass supported by steel frames that could withstand anything the aforementioned storms could dish out. The building supervisor could stand at the windows and watch a hurricane pass as though it were on the Weather Channel.

The museum is better protected than one of the largest hospitals in the state, Tampa General, which sits on Davis Island, a spit of earth that was dredged from muck at the bottom of the bay a few years after the last hurricane hit. Buckhorn said a category 3 hurricane would level the island’s houses, including his own.

Tampa General has a thorough evacuation plan, indoor generators that can supply energy for several days, and safe floors with reinforced walls and windows.

But parts of two bridges that lead to and from the island would be cut off by floodwaters, a concern of officials in spite of assurances by the hospital’s managers that there’s a contingency for that, too.